The art of manufacturing patchwork-type articles has been known through the centuries. In the United States, patchwork quilts and other articles have been made and used since the colonial period. Nor has interest waned over the years.
Patchwork items remain in vogue even today. Various fabrics have been marketed on which patch designs and stitching, apparently joining these patches together, have been imprinted to simulate patchwork. Even these mock patchwork fabrics have met with some modicum of success illustrating, thereby, the general popularity of patchwork goods.
It has been much more desirable, however, to possess more realistic patchwork goods in which discrete patches are, in fact, stitched to one another. The added popularity of these non-simulated goods results from their authentic appearance and the greater value attributed to them because of the "handmade" aspect of the article.
The fact that making genuine patchwork articles does require the investment of a significant amount of time and skill frequently, however, serves to discourage many persons from making them themselves. And, often, because of the significant amount of time and skill involved in their making, genuine patchwork articles are priced so as to prohibit their purchase by many people.
Patchwork articles prove time consuming and expensive to produce because the artisan is required to manipulate many small components in effecting the transition from raw materials to finished product. However, the time and skill investment involved because of the need to process many small swatches of material is not the only drawback in manufacturing genuine patchwork articles. Since so many small swatches are used, they can easily become lost or misplaced. Additionally, a not insignificant amount of time becomes involved in cleaning up after working on the product.
The invention of this application is directed to both a manufactured article and a process to act upon that article to produce a finished patchwork product, authentic and realistic in appearance. Use of the article and the process overcome the deficiencies of the prior art limiting the making of "genuine-appearing" patchwork goods.